IBM Elastic Storage Server vs. StarWind SAN & NAS

Reliable data storage and access is a big challenge in AI applications and IBM ESS is a service you need to solve the problem. If you are building an AI service and you already use the IBM ecosystem for AI compute requirements, ESS can serve as an excellent software based storage solution. Integration with other platforms such as EMR/Databricks is still a challenge and should be improved.

Incentivized

StarWind is best suited for the integration and deployment part and for the storage part as well. The product is budget-friendly and helps us to improve business agility. Can't think of negative scenarios as of now.

Incentivized

• Powerful processing power, literally support unlimited scale out storage capabilities
• well integrated and supported with multi flavor environment and file systems.
• Huge capacity with in a very reduced form factor of disks/enclosures

• Ease of Deployment
• Management interface
• Documentation and support
• performance

• Integration and configuration need a bit more technical expertise which is I guess expected.
• There can be some improvement in integration with Legacy applications.

Incentivized

• Can improve documentation.
• Can more focus on user training.

Incentivized

IBM ESS is optimized for AI and Big Data usecases while S3 is a general purpose storage solutions. EMR and Databricks have lakehouse/data warehousing solutions for distributed computing but are more optimized for just the big data pipelining solutions and not essentially for AI usecases, especially for inference, when you need to load model artifacts really quickly.

Incentivized

We chose StarWind SAN & NAS over Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct because it was more flexible to configure.

Incentivized

• When the cost and price dynamics comes into account, we have replaced age old traditional arrays with almost negligible cost with ESS
• able to extend the capabilities of global teams to work and share their experiences and knowledge with other teams.

• Allowed us to go all flash for 1/5 the cost
• Boosted end user experience due to high iops on flash
• lowered expenses on arrays and licensees